Contributor Details
Steve Asselin is a lecturer at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. His research interests include ecocriticism and the EcoGothic, speculative fiction, disaster fiction, and dystopia and apocalypse. He is currently pursuing research projects into the role of race in disaster and apocalyptic fiction, and the influence of early climate change fiction on our contemporary discourse. His work has appeared in such places as The New Centennial Review and the Journal for the Study of British Cultures. He is also the published author of over a dozen pieces of speculative fiction in various small press venues.
Katherine Bowers is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she specializes in Russian literature and culture. Her research interests include genre, narrative, and imagined geography. Her first book, Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press.
Anthony Carew is a Melbourne-based critic, writer, and broadcaster. He frequently types for Metro and Screen Education: https://theeducationshop.com.au/brands/Anthony-Carew.html
James M. Cochran is the Director of the 21st-Century Writing Competency Program and Writing Center at Hartwick College. His research interests range from first-year writing to the intersection of twentieth-century American literature, religion, and popular culture. His recent research appears in Intégrité, Religion and the Arts, Word and Text, Label Me Latina/o, Open Library of Humanities, and the Journal of South Texas English Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in English at Baylor University.
Jerome Cox-Strong holds an MA in English from the University of Reading, and began a PhD at the University of Manchester in 2021, researching dystopia and the child. His chapter interrogating Ayn Rand’s narratives of pedagogy in her non-fiction text The New Left is included in the edited collection Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts, published by Palgrave in late 2020.
Matthew Crofts was awarded his doctorate at the University of Hull, England, UK, for his research on the importance of tyranny to the Gothic mode, utilising a range of Gothic novels and historical eras. His previous publications include an article on MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman for Peer English (10, 2015), an article in the special ‘Alternative Dickens’ issue of Victoriographies (8:1, 2018), a chapter on Dracula’s multimedia legacy in the edited collection Gothic Afterlives (Lexington Books, 2019), and a joint-authored chapter on Gothic rats in the edited collection Gothic Animals (Palgrave, 2020).
Grant William Currier is earning his PhD in English at Oklahoma State University, where he serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and is the Writing Program Research Assistant. His areas of interest include creative writing, the history of the novel, and the rise of secularism. His work has been published in Waxwing and The Englewood Review of Books, among other places.
Rebecca Davey holds a BA Hons in English Literature and an MA in Crime and Gothic Fictions, both of which were achieved at Bath Spa University. She’s presented research at The International Crime Fiction Association’s annual conference Captivating Criminality, and at The Cardiff Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Seminar (CRECs). She has also volunteered as a social media coordinator for MIX conference in collaboration with Bath Spa University’s Centre for Transnational Creativity and Education (TRACE), and creative writing incubator Paper Nations. Since graduating in 2020 she has ghost-written novels, non-fiction, autobiographies, and SEO content, and has had several plays and short films produced as a playwright for Director’s Cut Theatre Company. She’s proud to be an essayist and the Artist Feature Columnist for Queer Majority, an online magazine dedicated to LGBTQ+ advocacy and discussion. Her two ginger tabbies, Phobos and Deimos, do not live up to the gravitas of their names.
Gavin Davies is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD student at the Universities of Exeter and Reading. His thesis examines the construction of imperial subjectivities in Georgian and Victorian board games. He has presented relevant papers at Yale University, and at the British Association for Victorian Studies. He writes, as well, on modern gaming cultures; his most recent publication appearing as part of MacFarland’s peer-reviewed book series Studies in Gaming, in the edited volume, Responding to Call of Duty: Critical Essays on the Game Franchise (2017).
Mark Fryers is currently associate lecturer at the University of Greenwich and previously at the University of Winchester, The University of East Anglia and New York University London. His numerous peer-reviewed publications include in the Journal of Popular Television, The Journal of Gothic Nature, and in Supernatural Studies as well as the edited horror collections The Spaces and Places of Horror, Global Horror Television and Nigel Kneale and Horror (forthcoming). He has also published on the British costume drama, global animation, children’s television and British maritime film and television.
Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca is an interdisciplinary visual artist/writer and arts educator. His artwork is in the Collections of MoMA New York, LACMA and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. His writing has been published in literary journals and publications including the online speculative fiction journal Strange Horizons, the literary journal Bilingual Review and the comic/manga magazine Shonen Jump/Aoharu. Gustavo collaborates visually with Detroit Techno producers Underground Resistance and Jeff Mills, Dub producer Francois K, art director/graphic designer Hideki Nakajima, graffiti painter Man One, comic creator Kenny Keil and others. As an Arts Educator, Gustavo creates art experiences for museums and arts organizations. Gustavo holds a BA from Hampshire College, Certificate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Certificates from the Architectural Association London and is currently a MA candidate at California State University Northridge. Gustavo’s website is: http://www.chamanvision.com
Jill Goad is an Associate Professor of English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she also serves as the writing lab director and editor of Shorter’s undergraduate journal, Bellwether. She has published articles on war trauma in twentieth century American literature, embodiment in Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, representations of marginalized labour in Trethewey’s work, and mothering in Toni Morrison’s novels. Her work can be seen in South, Eudora Welty Review, Studies in Gothic Fiction, and Irish Studies South. Jill’s most recent presentations have covered the new southern American gothic, the upended pastoral in Eudora Welty’s short stories, the new American baroque in Indigenous poetry, and the pre-Oedipal mother in literature of the American South.
Janine Hatter is Programme Manager of the Postgraduate Training Scheme (PGTS) at the University of Hull and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Janine’s academic research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, short stories as a genre, and Victorian women’s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic. She is co-editor of two series: New Paths in Victorian Fiction and Culture and Key Popular Women Writers, both for Edward Everett Root Publishers and is Co-President of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association.
Layla Hendow was awarded her PhD by the University of Hull. Her research focuses on the intersection between environmental studies and contemporary literature, and the ways in which literature can promote change and environmental consciousness. Her PhD thesis concentrated on the representation of waste in contemporary North American literature, and uncovered a literary phenomenon named the “Contemporary North American Waste Novel”. Her other interests lie in science fiction, apocalypse narratives and the works of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy.
Jade Hinchliffe is a Sociology PhD student at The University of Hull funded by the North of England Consortium for Arts and Humanities. She has a First-Class BA Hons in English Literature and an MRes in English Literature. Her thesis examines social sorting surveillance practices in twenty-first century global dystopian fiction.
Liam J. L. Knight is an English Literature PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the tradition of post-truth in literary dystopias, drawing on the assessments of post-truth being offered by today’s most engaged social critics, among them Peter Pomerantsev, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley. In particular, he locates this tradition within the ‘endotexts’ (fictional texts within works of fiction) of literary dystopias, using theories of transtextuality, metafiction, and reader response to account for how post-truth functions in fictional worlds, and how fictional examples of post-truth can help readers to combat the post-truth problem of the twenty-first century. He is former general co-editor of Ad Alta: The Birmingham Journal of Literature, he founded the university’s ‘Dystopias Reading Group’, is part of the ‘Pandemic Perspectives’ collective, and posts video essays, book reviews, and educational content on his YouTube channel, ‘DystopiaJunkie’.
Christina Lake completed a PhD on Eugenics in Utopian Literature with the University of Exeter in 2017, and currently works in the Research & Innovation department at Falmouth University. Her research spans a period from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and her interests include utopian fiction, SF, evolution, eugenics and genetics. Her latest publication is a paper in Academia Lunare’s Ties that Bind: Love in Fantasy and Science Fiction (2020).
Ann-Gee Lee is a Professor in the English, Rhetoric and Writing/Media Communication Department at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. She teaches composition, rhetoric and introductory film courses among others. She received a BA in English with a concentration in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Spanish minor and MA in TESOL as well as Rhetoric/Composition from California State University, Stanislaus. Her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing is from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She also taught first-year writing and advanced writing courses at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Her interests are watching and writing about television and film as well as covert rhetoric, civic discourse, women’s studies, art, design, fashion, food and languages.
David Lombard is a research fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and a PhD candidate in literary studies at the ULiège and KU Leuven (joint degree), where he is a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (CIPA), Intersections, and the Leuven English Literature Research Group. He is the author of the book Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (Italy, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), which served as an extended pilot study for his broader PhD project on the rhetorics and narratologies of the sublime in the contemporary American environmental memoir and novel (2020-2024). In addition, his essays and book reviews have been published in academic journals such as the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, the AM Journal of Arts and Media Studies, The Trumpeter, and Local Environment. Lastly, David’s editing work includes a co-edited (along with Stefano Rozzoni) special issue on ‘The Pastoral: New Trajectories in the Anthropocene’ (Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, December 2021), and he is an associate editor for the US studies academic association and research blog PopMeC.
Catherine Morris is an independent researcher whose research interests centre on the use of dialect in literature, and more widely on the Uncanny, the Gothic, and Science Fiction. She received the PhD from Kingston University in 2018, and is working on her first novel, represented by Anna Power of Johnson and Alcock.
Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University, Susan Signe Morrison’s books include The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter and Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. Her work on waste studies has been discussed in Slate, Wired, History Channel, American Public Media, and The New Yorker.
Julia Perczel has recently finished her thesis titled ‘The Alchemy of Green Markets: Materials, Ethics and Value Transformations in Delhi’s E-waste Sector’ at the Department of Anthropology, University of Manchester. She holds a BA and an MA in South Asian Studies and Hindi from SOAS, University of London, and an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from CEU, Budapest. Her PhD thesis explored the series of value transformations that are affected in the effort to regularize e-waste recycling in India. At the centre of these efforts are portrayals of e-waste as a source of harmful, toxic substances that produce negative value and directly harms labourers and those living around e-waste processing sites. Toxicity is fast becoming the ground for dispossessing the community that makes up the informal sector. This creates a tension between the environmental ethics of the practitioners and the effects of their policies on small e-waste traders, often portrayed as both victims and causes of toxicity.
Nicolai Skiveren is a PhD-fellow (5+3) at the Department of English, Aarhus University. His PhD project, Cinematic Waesthetics, examines the role of waste in contemporary cinema and film. Drawing on various strands of environmental philosophy, eco-cinema theory, and critical waste studies, the project explores the affective potential of moving images in shaping our experiences of and attitudes toward waste. Skiveren’s article on ‘Spectral Toxicity’ in HBO’s Chernobyl was published in Ekphrasis in 2020.
Olivia Steen is a UK born artist who recently moved to the United States. She has worked in the film and entertainment industries as a studio artist and makes artworks to sell in her spare time. She received a bachelor’s degree in Character Creation and Technical Effects before completing a master’s degree in Modern Literary Cultures in 2017. Her topics of focus include spatial theory and the Gothic. Olivia aims to continue her research in the future, with the intention of merging her literary and artistic backgrounds into a cross-disciplinary PhD.
Richard Gough Thomas is a writer and critic, the author of William Godwin: A Political Life and is a founder and reviews editor of the journal Dark Arts. He holds a doctorate in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature from Manchester Metropolitan University. He tweets under the unimaginative handle @RGoughThomas.
Mason Wales is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her research focuses on fictional representations of politics and the state.
Bradley E. Wiggins, Ph.D. is associate professor and head of the Department of Communications at Webster University’s Vienna campus. His research interests include internet memes, digital culture, and intercultural simulations and games. His scholarship has been published in competitive journals, such as Simulation & Gaming, New Media & Society, Social Semiotics and International Journal of Communication. His monograph The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture was published by Routledge in 2019 and re-issued in paperback in 2020.
Andrew F. Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Derby. He has published on millennialism, conspiracy theory, the far right, folklore, and UFO religions.